The history of Turkiye is complex and very long. Anatolia - Asian Turkiye - has always been at the centre of human history.
Excavations have revealed that Catal Hoyuk covered about 13 hectares (32 acres), and may have been home to as many as 5,000 people, who derived their livelihood from agriculture, for which they invented an urban irrigation system, and from trading in obsidian, a dark, glassy volcanic rock found locally which was ideal for primitive tool- making. They produced some quite remarkable religious shrines, frescoes, pottery and statuettes, many of which are on exhibition in Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara.
Catal Hoyuk survived intact for about 2,000 years and then, for reasons we will probably never know, was abandoned by its inhabitants. At about the same, around 5500 BC, the Neolithic city of Hacilar sprang up near Burdur, to the west of Catal Hoyuk. Hacilar is noteworthy not only because it produced some splendid painted pottery, and because here implements of copper began to replace those made of stone, but also because it is the first city known to have had houses arranged along `streets', as well as having the first houses with doors.
For the next three millennia Anatolian civilisation went through a long night of hibernation, until jolted awake around 2500 BC by the Hatti people, who built major cities at Kultepe, near Kayseri and in the Kizilirmak Valley northeast of Ankara. For the next 500 years the Hattian culture flourished, producing some of the loveliest works of art of the Bronze Age.
Around 2000 BC the Hatti were overwhelmed by an invading force of warriors known as Hittites. The Hittites built themselves a great capital at Hattusas, about 200 km east of Ankara, and for the next eight centuries developed a culture of enormous political and artistic sophistication.. In addition, they became an imperial power, perennially jousting with Egypt for control of the Middle East. Finally, after wresting Syria from the Egyptians and then crushing the armies of the great pharaoh Rameses II, a peace treaty was concluded by the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1259 BC - the first recorded peace treaty in history.
The peace did not last long for the Hittites. In the west, the Greeks in Troy and elsewhere along the coast came under attack from their Mycenaean cousins: the Trojan War. This was followed by a devastating invasion by waves of warriors from the islands in the Aegean. The invasion succeeded in obliterating Hittite civilisation so thoroughly that it is only within the last hundred years or so that scholars have been able to confirm that these extremely civilised and advanced people ever exited at all.
With the fall of Hattusas around 1200 BC Anatolia entered a dark age lasting for over five centuries. The social and cultural cohesion that had existed under the Hittites disintegrated as new arrivals from every direction either overwhelmed or joined forces with native peoples to create a vast jigsaw puzzle of smaller states stretching across Asia Minor. In the east were the Urartians, who established a kingdom around Lake Van, which by 750 BC extended all the way to the Caspian Sea. Weakened by repeated assaults from the Assyrians, they were finally overrun by the Scythians in 612 BC. In the west, Phrygians swept in from Thrace and established a kingdom with its capital at Gordium, southwest of Ankara. The Phrygians were an exceptionally artistic people, and in the ruins near Gordium one can see the world's earliest known mosaics. After a series of defeats at the hands of aggressive neighbouring states - leading to the suicide in 695 BC of their legendary King Midas - the Phrygians were finally conquered by Lydians in 650 BC.
The Lydians, whose capital was Sardis, east of Izmir, were as good at commerce as they were at conquest. Not only did they invent money as we know it - the idea of minting coins came from the Lydians - but also they produced someone spectacularly gifted at producing it - their King Croesus. South of Lydia was Caria, which had its capital Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum). Very much influenced by the Dorian Greeks, the Carians were to give the world the man every schoolchild knows as "the father of history" Herodotus. South-east of Caria was the kingdom of Lycia, which occupied the south-west corner of Anatolia and left behind little of interest apart from the stunning rock tombs carved into the cliffs along the coast.
With so many small kingdoms jostling for space and power across Anatolia, and with various predatory armies from abroad making forays across the land, it is hardly surprising that the 500 years following the fall of Hittites were distinguished by little more than constant turmoil. The exception to this generally bleak period in Anatolian life occurred in the Greek settlements along the coast. There, in the Ionian cities of Smyrna (modern Izmir), Phocaea, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, in Aeolia, and to a lesser extent in the Dorian cities further south, Hellenic culture took root and flourished in a way that it never did in Greece itself until after 546 BC, when the Persians under Cyrus the Great stormed across Anatolia and subdued all its peoples.
For the next two centuries all of Anatolia was a part of the Persian Empire, although the Ionian cities were to prove a constant thorn in the imperial side, frequently rising up against their new masters. Nevertheless, the Persians proved to be remarkably enlightened rulers and the light of classical Greek civilisation in Ionia was hardly dimmed. Then in 334 BC Alexander the Great crossed the Dardanelles and rolled back the tide of Persian domination, replacing it with an empire of his own that made Anatolia one of the heartlands of Hellenistic (and therefore Western) civilisation.
Upon Alexander's death in 323 BC in Babylon, at the age of 33, his empire quickly became fragmented as his generals fought among themselves for power and territory. Yet despite the wars that raged back and forth across the vast territory that the young Macedonian had conquered, the seeds of Greek culture that he had sown continued to sprout, ensuring that even after his death the Hellenization of Anatolia proceeded uninterrupted.
The peace, on the other hand, continued to be interrupted by civil wars and invasions, the most notable of the latter being the invasion in 275 BC of the Galatians, a Celtic people who established their capital at Ankara and went on to rule most of western Anatolia. Their contribution to Turkish history is most evident today in the startling number Turks with red hair, green eyes and freckles. Of the number of other kingdoms dotted around Anatolia at this time, by far the most interesting was that of Pergamon, which was both powerful and committed to the encouragement of the arts and learning. The king of Pergamon also made the wise strategic move of cooperating with the Romans, who were beginning to extend their empire, little by little, east of the Aegean. Finally, in 133 BC, the last king of Pergamon, the eccentric Attalus III, to the dismay of his subjects bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. The Romans called it the Province of Asia, and made Ephesus its capital.
For the next four centuries the spreading Roman hegemony in Anatolia brought unprecedented prosperity to the area as a whole and a special grandeur to the great cities like Ephesus, Smyrna and Antioch (modern Antakya), where Anthony and Cleopatra were married in 40 BC. Coincidentally, the two lovers had met in Tarsus, near the south coast, where a few decades later St. Paul was born - the man whose travels and preaching through Anatolia were to become a major nuisance to Rome, and the major contribution to the spread of Christianity.
In the two centuries that followed St. Paul's tireless evangelism, the new religion grew from being a nuisance to being a threat, at a time when Rome was already under threat from the waves of barbarians from northern Europe as well as from the newly militant Persian Empire to the east. In 268 AD tribes of Goths rampaged into Anatolia, laying waste to Ankara and other cities. The Roman Empire began to crumble, and towards the end of the third century split in half. The emperor Diocletian made Byzantium the capital of the eastern empire, reorganised the whole system of government, and then in 303 made one last savage effort to stamp out Christianity. It didn't work. Within two years he had abdicated. His successor, Constantine the Great, reunited the empire, accepted Christianity, convened the historic Council of Nicaea (modern Iznik) in 325, and rebuilt Byzantium into a great capital city which in 330 was dedicated as New Rome. It soon came to be known as Constantinople, and as such was to be the centre of the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years.
Outwardly, the Byzantine Empire went from strength to strength, reaching its zenith under the emperor Justinian (527-565). He codified Roman law and presided over a building program in Constantinople that culminated in the magnificent cathedral of Aya Sofia, which for 900 years was the undisputed jewel in the crown of Christendom.
Inwardly, however, the empire was showing signs of dry rot as early as Justinian's reign. Once the empire had been stretched around the Mediterranean, its resources became overstretched and its people, especially in Anatolia, overtaxed. Then the empire's population was decimated by a terrible plague, and soon afterwards the Lombards overrun Italy while the province along the Danube came under attack from the Avars. Thus weakened from without and within, Byzantine Anatolia was in no condition to fend off the Persians who swarmed in and destroyed Ankara, as well as other cities, in 622.
The year 622 was a fateful one for the Byzantine Empire, and indeed the world, for yet another reason; that was the year the prophet Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina, where he established the third great religion to come out of this part of the world, Islam. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Islam erupted out of this part of the world, for by 636 fierce armies of Muslim Arabs were storming out of the desert and biting off huge chunks of the Byzantine Empire. By 654 most of Anatolia had been put to the swords by the invaders, and within two decades Constantinople itself was under siege from the Arabs. The attack was finally beaten off, as was a second one 40 years later, but by the middle of the eighth century Muslim rule was firmly entrenched in eastern Anatolia. Two strikingly dissimilar cultures - one Byzantine and Christian, the other Arab and Muslim -- now inhabited the same peninsula.
Still despite all the centuries of attacking and defending, expanding and contracting, the Byzantines were not yet a spent force. Beginning in 867, with the accession to the throne (via assassination) of the emperor Basil I, Byzantium entered a golden age of cultural revival, political stability, and military conquest. But the end of the empire was nonetheless approaching.
The beginning of the end can be dated precisely. It happened on August 19, 1071, at Manzikert (modern Malazgirt), north of Lake Van, where a mounted army of central Asian nomads known as Seljuk Turks, annihilated a Byzantine force 10 times their size, and, to add insult to injury, captured the Byzantine emperor and held hum for ransom. By the time the ransom was paid the emperor had been deposed, and the Turks were pouring into Asia Minor. They quickly established control over most of Anatolia, making their headquarters first at Nicaea and then at Konya, where they ruled their newly-conquered territories with a mixture of strength and enlightenment that rapidly turned their new state into a model of good government and often great art, much of which can still be seen in and around Konya.
However, because the Seljuks were not only powerful but also Muslim, having been converted to Islam in the tenth century, the Crusades were launched in 1096 by European Christians to rescue the Holy Land from these marauders. The Crusaders had only very limited success against the Seljuks, so in 1204 the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade decided to sack Christian Constantinople, where the Byzantines still continued to hang on to the remnants of their empire. And they hung on for another 250 years. The Seljuks, alas, remained a force for only another 40 years, until in 1243 they were destroyed by the Mongol hordes at the Battle of Kosedag. But the seeds had been planted; thanks to the Seljuks there was now in Anatolia truly Turkish art and architecture, Turkish literature and music.
In other words, there was now the distinctive foundation of what would later be called Turkiye.
The end of the thirteenth century saw the appearance of a new Turkish tribe, the Ottomans. In 1326 they took Bursa, south of Constantinople, and made it their capital; in 1354 they made their first, successful drive into Europe. A century later, in 1453, with all of the Balkans under their control, the Ottomans under Mehmet the Conqueror took Constantinople. The city that had survived for more than a thousand years as the heart of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, as the great citadel of Christendom, finally disappeared into history. Among Mehmet's first act was a visit to Aya Sofia, where he knelt in prayer after declaring it a mosque; a few days later he declared that the city should be known as Islambol, the "city of Islam".
The age of Constantinople was over, the age of Istanbul was about to begin.
The Ottoman Empire experienced its greatest glory during the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent from 1520 to 1566. It was a time when imperial expansion abroad was mirrored by social and cultural advancement at home. After Suleyman's death the empire continued to expand until it blanketed the map from Vienna to Mecca, but the decadence and incompetence of the sultans who followed Suleyman guaranteed the inexorable decline and ultimate fall of the empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottomans were exhausted by their frequent wars with the Russians, who coveted the Bosphorus with its access to the Mediterranean. Moreover, their territory had shrunk as a result of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Egypt gaining their independence.
In 1830 a campaign of reform was instituted to try to halt the empire's disintegration, but by now it was too late. As the situation became more desperate, an underground group of intellectuals was formed to promote a radical restructuring of what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Known in the Western press as the "Young Turks", they finally succeeded in deposing the deranged and despised Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1909, but before they could accomplish anything they were embroiled in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, during which Macedonia and Western Thrace were lost. Then, of course, came World War I.
Thanks in part to a massive diplomatic blunder by the British, and a correspondingly brilliant manoeuvre by the Germans, Turkiye entered the war on the side of Germany and the Central Powers. With the Allied victory in 1918, the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist.
The question then was who would get the leftovers. There was no shortage of hungry claimants, and they all came to the table with their knives sharpened. The British and French carved off the bits they wanted, and then invited others to help themselves. The Greeks were the first to accept, eagerly occupying Smyrna (Izmir) in May 1919, and then striking into the Turkish interior with the help of the Allies mainly the British. But they came up against a problem. It was the same problem the Allies had come up against when they invaded Gallipoli in 1915. The problem was called Mustafa Kemal.
Mustafa Kemal was born in 1881, and as a young infantry colonel masterminded the brilliant defence of Gallipoli against the overwhelming numerical superiority of the invading Allied armies. An ardent nationalist, he was dismayed after the war to see foreigners dividing up his country while the superannuated Ottoman authorities yawned and looked the other way. He travelled the country setting up nationalist congresses and generally rallying people to the cause of republican revolution. With the Greeks entrenched on the Aegean coast and other occupying forces nibbling away at Anatolia, he established his headquarters at Ankara and in 1920 convened the first Turkish National Assembly. Apart from setting up a provisional government, Kemal also created a new army to defend Ankara against the advancing Greeks. In August 1921, in what is said to be the longest pitched battle in history, Kemal's army defeated the Greeks at Sakarya. The Greeks began to retreat massacring and burning wherever they passed and ended in Izmir in September 1922. Burning the city in flames, what was left of the Greek invading force fled back across the sea. A year later the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president. Later, grateful citizens of the nation that was born under Mustafa Kemal gave him the name Ataturk, "Father of the Turks."
By any measure, Kemal Ataturk must be reckoned one of the greatest leaders of modern times; by any measure I would apply, he is easily the foremost leader of the twentieth century. Consider: in the short span of 15 years, from the founding of the republic in 1923 to his tragically early death in 1938, Ataturk single-handedly transformed the ravaged remains of a backward, corrupt, militaristic, Islamic empire into a modern, democratic, secular state living in peace with its neighbours.
Even that triumphal summary scarcely does justice to his achievements. To appreciate better the scope of Ataturk's impact on the history of his nation one needs to inventory - however incompletely - the individual changes he wrought in the life of his people. I will take only the most salient examples. At Ataturk's behest:
In short, the Turks were asked to change overnight their centuries old habits, their dress, their forms of worship, their attitudes towards women, their calender, their alphabet and even their names. And they did!
What's more, they thanked their leader for this unprecedented upheaval in their lives and gave him the surname Ataturk in gratitude, and today honour his memory with statues, portraits and ceremonial tributes all across the land. Now that's leadership.
Ataturk died on November 10, 1938, at the age of 57. This deprived Turkiye of his genius at a time when the infant republic needed all the help it could get. He was succeeded by his old friend and comrade Ismet Inonu, who kept Turkiye neutral during World War II and who after the war was so scrupulous in pursuing the ideal of a truly democratic state that he made possible his own defeat in the election of 1950.
Export Promotion Centre of Turkey (IGEME)
http://www.igeme.org.tr
e-mail: igeme@igeme.org.tr
Turkish Embassy
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~turkembs/
e-mail: turkembs@ozemail.com.au
Turkish Consulate - Melbourne
http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/District/3080/
e-mail: dtmel@eisa.net.au
Turkish Consulate - Sydney
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8919
e-mail: dtsid@eisa.net.au